


Real Drowners

by orphan_account



Series: Quia Absurdum [3]
Category: The Society (TV 2019)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-25
Updated: 2019-06-25
Packaged: 2020-05-19 18:27:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,816
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19362184
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Grizz doesn't like people in his room. He doesn't like how much it gives away to people, loves the space as his own, and resents people who like to invite themselves into it and judge.Not that it applies to Sam, obviously.





	Real Drowners

**Author's Note:**

> Hey this is literally not even proofread, im just tired of looking at it. 
> 
> More of Grizz thinking really hard about books and Sam which is his default setting at this point. Just an extended look at that Thanksgiving scene, u know the one 👀

Under his bed, Grizz has a heavily annotated copy of The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Volume two, fifth edition, the corners are crushed smooth by repeated shuffling in and out of the crease between his headboard and wall. His dad had given it to him offhand after catching him curled up with it in his office chair late one night. Grizz's dad was good like that, had been generally more relaxed when it came to indulging  _ Gareth _ (always Gareth with him) in things his mom wouldn't make time for. Not that he blamed her per say, some people didn't have the patience or desire even to ruminate over old words by people long dead, and it made practical sense. His mom was a bit of a streamlined presence, friendly and gregarious but so focused on the next thing that she could barely finish what was in front of her. Dad though, he had a whole wall to wall bookshelf of poetry, classics, and most notably an entire shelf dedicated to the Encyclopedia Britannica. Grizz used to be fascinated with them as a kid, would smooth his fingers over the gold embossed spines; he wasn't allowed to take them out anymore though, he never seemed to put them back in order despite being numbered and his dad had finally placed a no contact order on them specifically. Everything else was fair game though.

 

So yeah, Grizz had immediately squirrelled away the book, taking it out at night and examining every square inch of the cover art for something he had missed. He didn't like it very much, it was ugly really, all the women had arms like the picture of a crucified Jesus that his mom kept framed in the living room. 

 

He took it out to read every night. He had a mason jar of highlighters, the thick ones, the skinny pen ones, the fancy ones with retractable tips- he hordes them like gold. It took him almost five months to go through and annotate the entire book- it's massive. He kept a notebook of quotes, page numbers, authors, and work titles written neatly in block print below each one. There are noticeable breaks in progress, stalling out when practice kicked up before an important game or when he had to close the book for a week in abject disgust at Donald Bartheme's incestuous musings. 

 

In the end, the pages were thick with bleeding color coded highlights and neat pen scribbles and post it notes lined up and tucked carefully into the creases between pages. He wasn't a purist, he fully believed in the right to dogear pages as he pleased and did so indiscriminately. 

 

Actually that was a lie.

 

He had page 2630 dogeared and casually highlighted, not because he had any particular fondness for Robert Creeley, but because it was a safe four pages in front of Howl by Allen Ginsberg.

 

The first time Grizz had read it, he was distantly aware that it existed, had come across it mentioned casually in some textbook or something, not that he had thought much of it. He was also distantly aware that he was gay and he also tried not to think much of that. But he'd sat there dumbfounded by the raw literary peregrination he had crawled through. It felt like it took years for him to finish actually reading it. He kept skipping back to reread lines, felt his eyes catch on the frank and raving descriptions and read them over and over until they had meaning and then again and again until they didn't. He spent a week on it, annotating it carefully, minimal highlights, all notes penned as small as he could write on post-it's that were then placed front to front and tucked carefully into the crease of the spine.

 

It felt like he was doing something wrong, felt that weird disconcerting thrill every time his eyes tried to skip past  _ cock and endless balls,  _ how he gave up and reread  _ fucked in the ass  _ until it didn't make him panic anymore. It's not like he doesn't watch porn, because he does, he's not  _ dead.  _ It wasn't a new concept or anything, but it was the first time it had crossed over into his sanctified space of literature and it jarred him. 

 

He keeps it behind his headboard, tucked up under the ledge that it's screwed into. Which is ridiculous, because no one who knows Grizz would think to flip through 2000 plus change pages of notes and highlights just to ask him why he  _ also  _ highlighted  _ that _ poem as well. He  _ knows  _ that, but he also knows that the thought of someone looking through it at all, reading  _ any  _ of his thoughts, makes him deeply uncomfortable. 

 

So it stays strategically hidden away like all the other little things about him that make him  _ him.  _

 

Grizz doesn't like people in his room. Clark, Jason, and Luke invite themselves in regularly, a casual disregard for boundaries that comes with years of friendship. Even Luke, for as good natured as he tends to be, makes himself right at home. Clark likes to go through his shit, picking through his lesser treasured books, holding up a glossy hardcover copy of a Yeats Anthology and snorting.  _ Romantic Visionary? _ He'd read.  _ Dude you're so fucking gay.  _ And Grizz had felt his throat spasm and choked out something quick and casually insulting enough that they laughed it off. Sometimes he brought girls up, and they all were kind of the same, liked to coyly sift through his desk and make cute little comments on him being  _ so smart.  _ He doesn't like thinking about the veritable  _ ghost  _ of all that sloppy lackluster sex left over in  _ his space.  _ He didn't like how much his room gave away to people, loved the space as his own and resented people who liked to invite themselves into it and judge. Or maybe taint it with their presence? It sounds fucking psycho when he says it like that. Maybe it's some latent only-child quirk or something. 

 

Sam is much of the same though. Less Clark and more random hookup girl. That strikes him abruptly when he realizes it. Clark, and the guys to a lesser extent, like to cover every flat surface with their presence, loud and nosy, making fun of his books and how neat his room actually is. They take up  _ space  _ in the way guys do, how  _ friends  _ do. 

 

Sam seems to follow after all of those girls, in terms of casually invading his space. 

 

He's not  _ coy _ or anything, he's not batting his eyelashes and flirting with him, but he's got a small knowing grin on his face. He bypasses the bed and the chair, immediately perching up on the desk and idly leafing through his notes, flipping through the pale and cracked copy of East of Eden that he's been working his way through. 

 

"You're so  _ smart,"  _ Sam says, not bothering to sign it, and he smiles back down at the book in his lap. Grizz gets a strange and incongruous flashback to the last girl he'd brought up here; Carla. She was cool, had sat on his desk the same way Sam is and said that she also liked Steinbeck. Grizz isn't sure what to feel about the comparison. Sam peeks back up at him, a shitty little grin on his face and signs,  _ fucking nerd. _

 

"Oh wow, fuck you man." Grizz laughs and makes sure to sign the  _ fuck you  _ as crisply as possible. Sam snorts a laugh. His left hand smooths over the bulk of pages, smooth corrugated cardstock. He's got good hands, expressive. Everything about him is expressive. 

 

He signs something hands moving carefully, quickly. He must realize that Grizz missed it and says. "My dad had this book." 

 

It takes him a minute to parse through why Sam looks so suddenly off balance. Takes in the neutral line of his mouth, and asks:

 

"Have you read it?"

 

Sam grimaces. "I didn't finish it." He shrugs and signs, "It's  _ dark _ ." 

 

Figures that the heavy handed Cain and Abel symbolism might smack a little too close to home for Sam. Grizz walks over to take the book from him, checking that his page is still marked. He's self-conscious all of a sudden, like Sam knowing  _ what  _ he's reading - especially considering how close it parallels him and Campbell - is more personal that he had intended to go. He's not sure what to do with his hands and he pauses by his bed, book in hand, Sam watching him carefully as he seems to stall out. Finally, he lays it on his nightstand, and sits down on his bed, facing the door. 

 

"I think…" he starts, and then looks at Sam so that he can see. "I think that I like it  _ because _ it's dark, yanno?" Sam stares at him, unblinking, and that feeling of wanting to justify himself creeps back in. "Like at the end of it all, it's just one big commentary on human nature, like some people are good, some people are bad, but most of us are right there in the middle just doing our best with the… I dunno, culmination of trauma and experiences and  _ shit _ our parents passed down to us." He waits until Sam nods. "It's not gentle or polite, it's all fucked up and that's just what real life is, I mean  _ fuck  _ man, look at  _ our _ lives." He laughs humorlessly, and Sam gives him a lopsided little smile that makes him heave out a shuddery breath. 

 

" _ Fuck,  _ no. We're here to learn-  _ I'm  _ here to learn. Teach me." He claps his hands on his thighs and it's abrupt and awkward but Sam takes it in stride, just like he does with the rest of Grizz's general weirdness. 

 

Sam has a little streak of dirk wrapping around the front of his thumb. He'd watched Grizz putter around the garden with his little grin, eyebrows quirking whenever Grizz said something exceptionally folky. He watches everything keenly, which makes sense in the context of communicating by sign, but Grizz didn't sign much so he kind of wondered what Sam was so focused on. He'd loved it though. It's unnerving sometimes, but being the sole focus of Sam's attention is weirdly exhilarating, like little prickles under his skin that coalesce into a nervous full body hum which makes it damn near impossible for him to relax all the way. It's exhausting. He likes it.

 

So he's hyper conscious of his face and his hair and his hands as he tracks Sam's, mimicking the best he can until Sam gets up to sit next to him on the bed, face earnest and open. Maybe the shock at having him suddenly so close shows on Grizz's face because he rolls his eyes and fixes Grizz's fingers quickly and neatly as if he's used to correcting sign, and maybe he is, with how many of his friends and family speak it, or try to.

 

He has the sudden thought that if this is a new universe or whatever and they couldn't make their way back, the language would die out with Sam. An entire world of knowledge and religion and culture would end here for them because for some reason someone or  _ something _ somewhere decided that small town Connecticut needed it's own fucking pocket dimension. That's insane. He wanted to move away from all of this so badly, out to California where it wasn't so blisteringly homogenized, where he could dress how he wants, love how he wants, learn everything that could possibly be taught to him by people who were nothing  _ like  _ him. If there  _ is _ something out there, beyond the dense crush of the forest, it won't be the same world that they left behind, that's for fucking sure.

 

_ What are you thinking? _

 

Sam's watching him, like he always does, catches his eye and signs again, hands moving slowly.  _ What are you thinking? _

 

"Uh, nothing, don't worry about it." He stutters. 

 

Sam raises his eyebrows. "You're never  _ not  _ thinking." He says pointedly.

 

Grizz sighs, tips his head back to look at the ceiling, the window, just anything that's not Sam and his steady observation, and abruptly feels guilty for not being able to focus on signing, or practicing, even though that was his entire excuse for sequestering them away to his house- where no one can intrude on them. He can feel Sam next to him, part of that ever present awareness that he's being watched. He imagines the picture they must make, sat stiffly on his bed like every teen romcom ever made, he can feel how tense he is, knows Sam can tell because when he looks back, Sam is facing the door too, brows furrowed like he's trying to think of something to say. Grizz has  _ never  _ been this socially uncoordinated, prides himself on it actually, but it's the first time that there's been  _ stakes _ . 

 

"I wasn't always deaf, you know." Sam says abruptly, and Grizz lifts his head, surprised. He says it like the signed those first few words to him.  _ I hated highschool. _ Not like he was looking for pity or anything, or even making some kind of excuse for some imaginary perceived shortcoming or something weird like that; it's like he's contextualizing himself. That's it. He's contextualizing himself so that he's not misunderstood, which probably happens to him more than normal considering what effectively manifests as a language barrier. He thought about his own brief stint learning Hebrew and how it left him on unsteady ground, constantly trying to make sure that he was saying the right thing, that it implied the right thing, and then he thinks he's got maybe a fraction of an idea as to what immigrants felt like coming here, and even then no one mocked him the same way they do them, and Sam too probably. 

 

He signs along, slower than he would normally, Grizz notices. "I was three, maybe four."

 

Grizz, for all of his poetics, his love of plays and classic literature, is not a romantic. He's just not. He sees how his friends talk about their girlfriends - well not Luke, Luke is an outlier almost on par with Grizz himself - and how quickly they shuffle through them, how little meaning anything has. Even his own parents don't exactly love each other anymore, as copacetic as their cohabitation may be. Maybe it's because he never thought he would have anything real, not really, not  _ here _ . But he listens to Sam, nods, signs when he can. It makes Sam smile a little, and he feels some kind of emotion bubble up in his chest, feels it all over his face, thinks this is it, this is as good as it will ever be, and then it settles into something a little less tenuous. And then it's like the words are pried from his mouth, he doesn't remember giving himself permission to ask, but he's asking Sam to kiss him and he doesn't want to look at his face, hopes that maybe if he's not looking at Sam then Sam won't be looking at him. But he is, because of course he is, he always is. And there's a beat where he thinks  _ oh fuck _ he fucked it up, he didn't understand, or he  _ did  _ and didn't want to- And them Sam is kissing him, like Grizz kind of knew he would, panic aside. He's strong, stronger than all the girls who's time he wasted, stronger than Carla and somehow so much surer of himself then Grizz could ever hope to be. His  _ hands  _ are stronger, just like Grizz imagined they might be. Blood pulses in his ears, almost like the first hint of the spins, and Sam puts a hand on his chest, pushes him back. Taps him in the chest until he opens his eyes.

 

"Relax," he says, signs it pointedly. Close to his face, so close Grizz can feel Sam's breath on his cheek. He signs it again, _relax,_ but Grizz isn't watching anymore. So Sam take matters into his own hands, as he does more and more now with that strange well of endless surety that Grizz could only dream of. He pushes into Grizz's space, welcoming himself into it, pressing as close as he can with how he's seated. One hand still on Grizz's chest - he can probably feel his heartbeat - one hand strong and sure on the side of Grizz's face. And only then does Grizz fucking _relax,_ finally lets himself actually kiss back and it's a kiss. Not earth shattering or new or anything, but knowing that it's _Sam_ , that Sam likes him back, that's enough to make it the best kiss he's ever had, better than every kiss with every girl he used to soothe the anxiety of being _other._ Better than all the shitty sex and one off dates that went nowhere because he didn't want them to. 

 

And then like it always seems to go, self-consciousness is pushed to the side and time moves a bit faster and Grizz stops thinking long enough for them to trade awkward and honestly terrible blowjobs. For Sam to look at him after, face solemn and sign,  _ that was awful _ . And then they're both laughing, laughing in a way that says  _ finally,  _ all the weird tension the expectation, it's all over and done with. Equal footing. Sam laughs loudly, something Grizz has never heard before, it's strange and discordant - wholly unselfconscious - and it makes Grizz wheeze with laughter too. They're red faced and sweaty, they  _ stink _ , but they curl up together, still grinning. They quiet down, and then Sam peeks up at him once more and it sets them off again. It's stupid. It's fucking dumb and that fizzy subdermal tension is long gone. 

 

Then because he's Grizz, he has a thought.

 

"Is this-" Sam looks up, can probably feel the vibration of him talking through his chest which sends more of the warm settled feeling crashing through his ribcage. It takes him a moment to remember what he was going to say, Sam with his unwavering stare locked back onto his face. "Is this because I'm, I dunno, the only option? Like I'm sure we're not the only ones, but-" and then Sam pats his chest, shakes his head. 

 

"I was prepared to be alone forever." He says, signing as well as he can with his arm crooked up as it is. So matter of fact too, like it's something simple, like it's what he's having for dinner. It makes Grizz's heart hurt because that's what  _ he _ thought too. "I had accepted it, for the most part." He goes quiet and thoughtful. "I'm glad you found me. I'd choose you even if there  _ was _ someone else I think." 

 

Grizz swallows, nods. He takes him at his word because Sam never seems to waste time being disingenuous. 

 

He could listen to Sam talk for hours. He does. Sam doesn't like talking, or doesn't like how people react to his voice, so it makes Grizz smugly pleased that he talks to him so much, that he rises beyond the self-conscious whisper that he used to use, bright and animated. There's no real pretense to him, Grizz thinks. He says what he's thinking, jumps in to everything head first like he knows it will work itself out regardless. Confident in a wholly different way than Grizz is. He falls asleep with little preamble too. One minute he's talking about something Becca had done, Grizz is barely absorbing the words as it is, just watching him speak, and then his eyes fall shut and he's quiet. It wakes Grizz up a little, nudging him back to awareness of where he is and who he's with.  

 

Their clothes are on the ground, mixed together in one big heap of what needs to be laundry _soon._ His desk chair is still spun out sideways from where Sam had propped his feet up on it, and his copy of East of Eden is still sitting like a brick on his nightstand. Sam had left a noticeable change, nothing major, but Grizz can tell he's been here, looks like he had shifted the careful balance of Grizz's space, had made himself comfortable in a way that's maybe a mix of _friend_ and _whatever else_ this was. It doesn't feel wrong though, he's not got a nagging discomfort or the urge to reassert the tenuous boundaries he's able to maintain. He doesn't feel intruded upon. 

 

Thanksgiving is a bullshit holiday, founded in honor of a greedy and genocidal batch of colonists, and over celebrated especially in the insular bubble of New England. He doesn't put stock into it, finds it irks the part of him that is both educated and has even an ounce of empathy for people who aren't him and his. So he feels thankful for having Sam here with him, and how it all fell into place, just the same as he would feel thankful any other day of the year to see Sam and have him so close. He looks down at Sam's head, bright ginger hair pillowed in the crook of his arm, and reaches behind his headboard.

 

The spine of his book is cracked so deep that it's almost perforated. It falls open easily to what must be a couple hundred pages shy of dead center, the motion familiar. He listens to Sam's soft sibilant breathing next to him, and reads the familiar words of Caramel Point. Reads them again. Highlighted in yellow - crisp and clear with a hand so slow and steady that the ink bled slightly in the middle - are two couplets. He can't pinpoint exactly why they had struck him so deeply, but Robinson Jeffers and his near pious reverence for nature did tend to resonate with him more than most. 

 

_ This beautiful place defaced with a crop of suburban houses- _

_ How beautiful when we first beheld it _

 

He whispers the words aloud, book held open with one hand pressing it against his bent knee, the other resting on the breath-warm skin of Sam's forearm. 

 

_ We must uncenter our minds from ourselves; _

_ We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident _

 

A Post-It blocked edge to edge with notes about Shine, Perishing Republic slips loose when his grip shifts. It flutters down onto his bare stomach and he's hit with more of that quiet, comfortable vulnerability. Sam's chest rises and falls with his breath, and Grizz tucks the note back in between the pages, closes the book. 

 

Sam shifts in his sleep, murmurs something and rolls over to face the wall. Grizz stares at the pale curve of his spine, then turns away. He places his book on the nightstand, right on top of East of Eden, and shuts off the light. 


End file.
